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NASA's Own X Prize?

Posted by timothy on from the incentive-pay dept.

Roger_Explosion writes "NASA has announced that its 2005 budget includes 20 million dollars allocated to what it calls 'Centennial Challenges.' These are described as 'a series of annual prizes for revolutionary, breakthrough accomplishments that advance exploration of the solar system and beyond and other NASA goals.' The article on the X Prize site seems to suggest that this was a collaborative effort between the X-Prize organisation and NASA. You can read the story on the X Prize site."

7 of 152 comments (clear)

  1. Tourism? by monstroyer · · Score: 5, Insightful

    Although I am happy that funds like this are reviving the human desire to develop more space bound technology, this x prize is to jumpstart the space tourism industry.

    I see in my mind's eye several hawaiian shirt and sunglasses wearing citizens doing limbo and playing shuffle board on a double decker space bus. It just feels tacky and it is far removed from my utopian Star Trek TNG tendencies of space exploration.

    Is humankind so pathetic that the only reason we want to go into space is to expand the tourism industry?

    1. Re:Tourism? by sangreal66 · · Score: 5, Insightful

      The idea is that by creating a space tourism industry companies will need to invest in the advancement of space technology to accomodate the tourism. The resulting advancement of space technology is needed to propel the world into space for non-tourism activities. At least, that is what I think.

    2. Re:Tourism? by Anonymous Coward · · Score: 5, Insightful

      While I believe that space exploration is more important that space tourism - space tourism will jumpstart private funding of the space program.

      I read that the top 500 millionaires said they would pay up to $100,000 for a short flight into "subspace". By offing space tourism as a new luxury for the wealthiest people in America, these people are more likely to consider investments/donations for more exploratory space programs (namely NASA).

    3. Re:Tourism? by Genda · · Score: 5, Interesting

      It's so good to know that Columbus got it all wrong... Holiday Inn should have sent the first ships from Spain and built fine accomodations in the new world...

      Since when did we become such spineless weenies!!! I can't even believe the silly crap wafting to my ears... we just spent enough money to freakin' move New York city to the moon, bombing the crap out of people who weren't bothering anybody but each other, all so that President Shrub could give his Daddy the most expensive Christmas gift in recorded history. Then we decide we haven't got the intestinal fortitude to pursue our destiny, our inspired future, because we haven't the will to generate the amount of money collected by The Starbucks Corporation during any given 45 minutes period of their business day. Oohhhhh, it's soooooo hard to save the kind of money needed to get into space, it's so expensive. Oohhh, let's suck up to the "spa class", and suggest maybe the best tan in the universe can be had on the moon! Then they'll build the future for us and we won't have to grow a friggin spine!

      People... Suck it the FSCK up... our future is out there. It's not here. Here will go away. Here is dangerous... we got asteroids, and super volcanoes, and tsunamis big as mountains, we got global warming, we got methane in the sea floor, we got virii and ice ages, and it's just a very uncertain place to be... we need to spread our eggs to more than one backet. We need to get life to other places. We need to explore and grow into our universe. All of that takes guts. All of that takes commitment. It takes saying I will pay the price of admission to build a bold future, that mankind will have more than we have today.

      I'm willing to contribute the price of a Grande Mocha Latte with a shot of hazzlenut, if I know that in ten years we'll have a sustainable access to the universe, and that in twenty years a half million people will live on the moon.

      This is one of those time when somebody with a little vision and a lot of testoserone needs to stand up and say follow me, I'm going up there, last one there to join me is a BIG FAT WEENIE!!!

      Genda Bendte

      "The meek shall inherit the earth the rest of us shall receive the stars..." -- Isaac Asimov

  2. Ends justify the means? by King_of_Prussia · · Score: 5, Interesting

    If promoting space travel as a possible tourist activity can help develop the technology faster, I say do it.

    --

    Making the moon less necessary since 1998.

  3. research prizes bring 16:1 investment return by exratio · · Score: 5, Informative

    Research prizes work so much better than many other methods of investment in progress that it's surprising you don't see more of them. On average, you'll see 16 dollars invested in progress for every 1 in the prize.

    Here's a good article (plus links to other articles) on why research prizes are a great thing: http://www.longevitymeme.org/topics/research_prize s.cfm

    Reason
    Founder, Longevity Meme

  4. Keep the proper scale in mind by roystgnr · · Score: 5, Interesting

    The X Prize isn't about putting another man on the moon, or even putting another one in orbit. It's just about building a rocket that can get people above the atmosphere repeatedly, quickly, safely, and cheaply. Such a rocket doesn't need much in the way of performance compared to a real launch vehicle.

    For that goal (especially the "cheaply" part), increasing the amount of prize money could actually be detrimental. An expensive winning vehicle in 2000 (which could have been done, if the prize money was enough to lure a big aerospace company into the race) would have been much less of a "return on investment" than a cheap winning vehicle in 2005.

    A big part of the reason why space exploration is stuck in a rut is that when we started it, we had a post-war technology (expendible artillery rockets) that could be used to "get people to space, and damn the cost". Well, we've been using those sorts of rockets ever since, and "DAMN, the COST!" Rocket fuel is cheap, but rockets and rocket engineers are expensive, and when we throw away the former and hire armies of the latter to supervise a few launches a year it gets really expensive. There are a lot of people (myself included) who think that the only way to change this is with reusable, rapid turnaround launch vehicles, and who speculate that the natural way to develop those vehicles is from technology developed flying suborbital prototypes. Our previous strategy of "start with a huge orbital rocket, and try to make it cost effective" (the Space Shuttle) turned out to be so expensive that when it failed we couldn't afford to try again. Hopefully the alternate strategy of "start with a cost effective rocket, and try to make it orbital" will be more successful, and even when it does have failures it's a lot easier to repeat a multimillion dollar experiment than a multibillion dollar one.

    The reason these Centennial challenges (and the X Prize) are so exciting is that there's a problem with our alternate strategy: revenue. There's a commercial market for orbital rockets, but not much of a market (except for tourism, war, and the occasional science experiment) for suborbital rockets, and nobody wants to start a multi-decade research program if it's not going to bring in any money until the end. If NASA can provide funding for those projects in such a way that they can't be "cheated" into paying for failures (like they were with the X-33), it makes that long term strategy into a short term opportunity.

    Hmm... I didn't intend that to be so long; I should shut up now, find a link for anyone who's actually still reading this, and go to sleep. There's a large relevant discussion at Jerry Pournelle's website; Pournelle's opinions on this subject don't differ much from mine, he's had most of them longer than I've been alive, and he's better at articulating them.